“Don’t worry,” she added, “Ripper threw him in a ditch.”
“Naturally,” he said.
Zoe said she was worried about what would happen when her mother saw the car. She didn’t want to tell her about the hunter because her mother had enough worries as it was.
“The lords didn’t teach you how to fix cars, did they?” she said. “There wasn’t, like, a shop class?”
She was joking, but nonetheless X approached the car. He ran his hand along the crumpled passenger door, heating the metal until it felt liquid beneath his palm and then smoothing it again. He’d never done anything like this before, not exactly. He liked the feeling of undoing violence for a change.
“That’s amazing,” said Zoe. “But that dent was already there, so you’ve got to put it back.”
X laughed, and punched the door.
They circled the car together. Zoe pointed out the damage that the hunter had done, and X restored everything, even the sagging bumper and shattered headlights.
“Thank you,” said Zoe when he’d completed his ministrations. “Now it’s just a regular piece of crap again.”
“Could you not simply acquire a new car?” said X.
“Do you know what a new one costs?” said Zoe. “We don’t even have a house anymore, dude. Love me, love my shitty car.”
“Fair enough. I love your shitty car.”
They went down the slope toward the river, where Zoe and her family had spread Bert and Betty’s ashes. The ground was muddy, and tried to pull off their boots.
“I’ve talked a storm of words this evening,” said X, “yet there is something more I must tell you. I have a plan to escape the Lowlands.”
He felt Zoe stop walking. They were halfway to the river.
“Why are you just telling me this now?” she said.
“Well, in the boat, my mouth was otherwise occupied—with your mouth,” he said. “And truthfully, the plan is no doubt a folly, and I dreaded you telling me so.”
When Zoe spoke next, X heard the nervousness beneath the humor, like a shadow following immediately behind.
“I probably wouldn’t use the word ‘folly,’ ” she said.
They sat on a tilted rock by the water. X offered to light the woods, but Zoe said she liked hearing the river in the dark—the sort of gulping sound it made.
“Tell me everything,” she said. “Go, go, go.”
X searched his mind for a beginning.
He told Zoe that from the moment he’d refused to take her father’s soul, he had sat in his cell in the Lowlands with barely the company of a human voice. Ripper was on the run. Another friend, Banger, had been punished for ferrying messages between Zoe and X. Here, Zoe interrupted to say that she had liked Banger—not just because he so thoroughly repented the murder he had committed when he was a bartender in Arizona, but also because she had seen him eat candy and chew gum at the same time.
“Is that not commonplace?” said X.
“Not unless you’re six,” said Zoe. “Also, the guy uses really out-of-date slang. He said I was ‘the bomb diggity.’ ” She scowled. “I talk too much when I’m anxious. Ignore whatever I say, and keep going.”
“Yes, all right,” said X. “The cells on either side of me were empty for the first time I could remember. A Russian guard brought me food—he was the only one who spoke to me at all. He has been besotted with Ripper for decades, so he would linger with me awhile, moaning, ‘Oh, how I luff my Reeper!’ It was not a conversation in the usual sense.”
“Does Ripper like him, too?” said Zoe.
“It would appear not,” said X. “She has bitten him several times.”
“Naturally,” said Zoe, “but you’re supposed to be ignoring me.”
“I’m—I’m trying,” said X. “Regent never visited, which wounded me. I assumed he was furious that I’d betrayed his trust, and broken the laws of the Lowlands so wantonly when I fell in love with you.”
“Oh, yeah, you’re from hell, but I’m the bad influence,” said Zoe.
X pursed his lips to keep from smiling.
“I am ignoring you,” he said.
X told Zoe that he’d resented Regent’s absence more with every hour. He became consumed with the fact that though Regent had always watched over him, he’d gone 20 years without revealing that he had known X’s mother. His whole life, X had been starved for a single fact about his parents, but only recently did Regent tell him that X’s mother had once been a lord and that he had called her a friend. Even then he’d divulged virtually nothing else—just that she was punished for becoming pregnant with X, and was now imprisoned in some especially wretched corner of the Lowlands.
X stood up on the rock.
“If you don’t mind, I’m weary of darkness,” he said. “And I must soon return to it.”
“Of course,” said Zoe. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
X swept a hand through the air, and half a dozen firs across the river flushed with light.
“Today, Regent and Dervish appeared at my cell, and said they were sending me for Ripper,” said X, sitting again. “I had twisted myself into a rage by now. And seeing them side by side repulsed me, for Dervish’s soul is nothing but a sack of snakes. I did something that shocked them both: I refused to go.”
“Wait, what?” said Zoe.
“I told them I would only bring them Ripper if they freed me forever,” said X. “Remember, Ripper had already rebuffed dozens of bounty hunters. She’d stripped one man’s military uniform off, and sent him back naked! The Russian had told me everything. He had even acted out some of the combat. I knew the lords needed me, so I set my price high.” He paused. “Dervish cursed until there was spittle on his lips. Regent insisted that they didn’t have the authority to free me, which I believed, as there is a Higher Power that presides over even them. So I said, ‘Very well, then—when I return, you must bring me to my mother and father.’ ”
“Holy crap,” said Zoe. “Look at you go.”
X continued: Dervish had stormed away, telling Regent to tame the beast he’d created. Regent stepped closer to the bars of X’s cell, and spoke in a low voice. He regretted that he knew nothing at all about X’s father—and that, so far as he knew, there were only two people who knew exactly where X’s mother was being held.
One was Dervish, who had despised her and would never help them. Regent declined to name the other person, which infuriated X. Still, Regent said that if X could capture Ripper, he would try to introduce him to this mysterious party. He swore X to secrecy, for Dervish would wreak havoc if he learned of the pact.
“Did you ask Regent why he waited twenty years to tell you he knew your mom?” said Zoe.
“Yes—and the question actually inflamed him,” said X. “He said, ‘I told you nothing about your mother because hope is dangerous here. You would have used anything I told you to torment yourself, and I had determined that your life was torment enough.’ Apparently, there’s a poem about hope being ‘the thing with feathers’? Regent said, ‘What the poet neglects to mention is that it has not just feathers but talons, too—for it is a bird of prey.’ I told him I didn’t care. I told him I could no longer live without hope now that you had shown me what it was. I swore I’d escape the Lowlands somehow. And my plan—my folly, if that’s what it is—crystallized as Regent and I stood there with the bars between us.”
X stopped again. It was time to bring Ripper home. With his index finger, as if he were striking notes on a piano, he made the firs across the river go dark one by one.
“I told Regent that I would save my mother—and then she would save me.”
six